June 2006 - Posts
The rockets NASA plans to use to go to the moon and perhaps on to Mars will be called Ares 1 and Ares 5, the agency's associate administrator for exploration systems announced today. The names pay "homage to Saturn," NASA's Scott Horowitz said, referring to the Saturn 1 and Saturn 5 rockets that were used for the first push to the moon.
Ares was the god of war in Greek mythology, the equivalent of the Roman god Mars. So NASA's new rocket name is meant to evoke the Red Planet - but Horowitz insisted that it's not meant to sound warlike. "We didn't name it after the god of war," he told reporters. "That's not our intent. Our intent was that it relates to Mars and exploration."
Even though Horowitz proposed a pacifist rationale for the name, the Ares rockets should pack quite a punch.
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NASA is catching up with the schedule for the shuttle Discovery's launch preparations, making up for a delay that was sparked on Thursday by a lightning alert. This afternoon, the final experiments are being stowed in the orbiter's middeck area - including a collection of microbes that will be used to see how space travel affects mutation and DNA repair, and an intrepid platoon of fruit flies.
Fruit flies?
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We aren't even close to Saturday afternoon's scheduled launch attempt for the shuttle Discovery, and already folks here at Kennedy Space Center in Florida are talking about the prospect for repeated countdown resets reminiscent of the comedy "Groundhog Day," in which Bill Murray lives out the same day over and over again.
The reason? It's not because of technical glitches - none of those are in sight, NASA test director Pete Nickolenko said at this morning's countdown status briefing. Rather, it's the weather forecast that sounds like a broken record.
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As NASA prepares for the shuttle Discovery's launch, you can expect to see a delegation of dignitaries down at Kennedy Space Center in Florida - led by Vice President Richard Cheney and his wife, Lynne. NBC News quotes administration sources as saying that the Cheneys are due to take in Saturday's launch as well as the the Pepsi 400 NASCAR race in Daytona, then head back to Washington for Independence Day. That schedule may be all wet, however. ...
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Transformational Space, or t/Space for short, today announced that it has added Ball Aerospace to its team in the competition to build a low-cost replacement for the space shuttle. The announcement serves as another example of the interlocking alliances being made to pursue $500 million offered through NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, or COTS.
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• Improbable Research: Shodden Freud and other studies
• The Australian: King Tut's necklace shaped by fireball
• Times of London: Scientists playing God? We should rejoice
• New Yorker: The Nietzsche Diet ... for Supermen
Are UFOs real? Well, it all depends on what you mean by unidentified flying objects. Obviously there are things that seem to fly in the sky that we can't quite make out - but are they Frisbee disks or flying saucers, neurological glitches or interdimensional visitors? Last week we ran an update on the state of "scientific" ufology, and received scores of sighting reports in response. Read on for details on some of the mysterious questions and not-so-mysterious answers.
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• N.Y. Times (reg. req.): How to cool a planet (maybe)
• Defense Tech: All-seeing blimp on the rise
• New Scientist: New telescope will hunt dangerous asteroids
• NASA: What are those mysterious swirls on the moon?
Joan Roch / Mars Society |
Clad in simulation spacesuits, Mars Society crew members walk away from their
habitat for "extravehicular activity" during a 2004 expedition to Devon Island.
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Being cooped up on a space mission can do funny things to you - even if it's a make-believe mission. During an extended simulation of a voyage to Mars back in 1999, a bloody fistfight reportedly broke out between two ersatz astronauts, and one woman participant complained of sexual harassment.
So it'll be interesting to see what happens next year, when the Mars Society is due to stage a simulated four-month mission - not within the comfy confines of a laboratory, but amid the frozen wastes of the Canadian Arctic.
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• Science News: Aging brain shifts gears to emotional advantage
• Flight International: Explorer spaceship faces 100-plus test flights
• BBC: Hurricane machine to flatten home
• The Guardian: Massive mummy fraud discovered after 2,000 years
FAA |
Some of the contenders in the commercial spaceflight race are more hush-hush than others - and virtually no one is more secretive than Blue Origin, the space effort funded by Amazon.com's billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos. Most of what's known publicly about Blue Origin has come from the rare interview or public-record filing - or from just skulking around.
Fortunately, there's a new public record that provides lots of detail about what Blue Origin is up to - an almost mind-numbing 229 pages' worth. Page for page, it's probably the biggest assortment of Blue's clues yet.
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It may not be as heady as the X Prize, but the Space Frontier Foundation is planning what you might call the B Prize for space-related business plans. The payoff for the best pitch? Entrepreneurial glory ... plus a $1,000 poker chip, awarded by an investor at the foundation’s annual conference in Las Vegas next month.
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For the 10th year, researchers are journeying up to the Canadian Arctic to test tools and techniques that could be used during future Mars missions. And now there's a new destination nearby: Arctic Europa, a stand-in for a moon of Jupiter that may harbor ice-covered oceans and even life.
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Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking may speak out on global warming and space settlement as well as string theory, but his reputation really rests on his work on the frontiers of space, time and black holes. For scientists, then, the real buzz is over his latest research paper, which asserts that our universe is actually the result of fuzzy quantum interference involving a multitude of possibilities - including, just for instance, universes where Hawking rules the world.
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• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Supersonic Dream'
• The Economist: To catch a gravitational wave
• The Engineer: Robot dogs evolve their own language (via Slashdot)
• Scotsman.com: 1,000 toga-clad skeletons found in Rome catacombs
Even as one NASA team prepares for next week's shuttle launch, another team is taking a hard look at six alternative visions for low-cost successors to the shuttle. NASA officials are keeping a low profile, but the six finalists involved in the agency's $500 million commercial space competition are giving way more visibility to those future spaceship visions.
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• New Scientist: Hubble's key camera stops working
• Phrenopolis: Hydrogen atom scale model (via Monkey Bites)
• EurekAlert: Why are uniforms uniform?
• The Guardian: Don't drink and write
NASA / SSI |
The science team behind the Cassini mission to Saturn have put together a silent-film festival you can enjoy from the comfort of your computer screen. The mostly black-and-white featurettes show the graceful movements of Saturnian moons against the background of the planet and its rings.
Although the show may not be as action-packed as "Superman Returns," I'd still give it a five-star rating.
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The next time someone tells you that scientists never get the big bucks, point that person toward the Web site for the $1 million Shaw Prize. Today's prize-winners include a trio of astronomers who are being honored for discovering something even though they don't know what the heck it is.
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• Popular Science: The supersonic shape-shifting bomber
• Christian Sci. Monitor: Monitoring human rights? Get a satellite
• Univ. of Mich.: Was the 'earliest hominid' really just an ape?
• Crop circles and more from Sub Rosa magazine
Hollywood is reviving the saga of the Man of Steel in a big way this month – and that serves to revive the debate over just how scientifically impossible Superman’s powers are. As usual, there are grains of truth beneath the Hollywood hokum.
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Don't you just hate it when you've kept up with an online auction for that bauble you've been lusting after, only to see it fall instead to a out-of-the-blue bidder in the final moments? If you're not armed with the software to put in a last-second bid, the practice of "sniping" or "bidnapping" hardly seems fair.
But hey, who said science had to be fair?
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• Cornell: Earthrise on Mars (via Bad Astronomy)
• National Geographic: Rare 'rainbow' spotted over Idaho
• Defense Tech: Look out, Pyongyang? Rail gun in the works
• N.Y. Review of Books: Religion from the outside
Nothing makes a better headline than the phrase "Missing Link Found" - and last week's report about the 110 million-year-old bird fossils found in China served as a prime example. The researchers themselves accepted the idea that the ancient Gansus yumenensis represented in a missing link between the age of dinosaurs and the modern age of birds.
It's certainly thought-provoking that fossils dating from that far back - only a few tens of million years after the time frame for Archaeopteryx - look so much like present-day waterfowl, right down to the webbed feet. But what really got folks in a tizzy on both sides of the Darwinian debate was the use of the term "missing link."
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Pamela Melroy is due to become the second woman to command a NASA space mission, based on today's announcement of the crew for the STS-120 mission.
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• Science News: Carbon goes glam
• BBC: Dry ice creates toughened glass
• Discover magazine: Can random data become conscious?
• Discovery.com: Scientists pinpoint baboon stress
The group that staged NASA's first-ever Centennial Challenge has issued its first public draft rules for yet another $250,000 contest - this time, for gangs of robots capable of piecing together a plumbing system under outer-space conditions.
NASA is putting up the prize money and says the program "may directly affect how exploration is conducted on the moon." Come to think of it, the challenge just might affect how construction jobs are done here on Earth as well.
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• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Newton's Dark Secrets' | Cosmic Log reloaded
• The Economist: Nukes under new management
• Astronomy: Mercury lingers in the twilight
• Slate: Blogging the Bible
The American Southwest is emerging as the nation's new "space belt," with final-frontier entrepreneurs gravitating to Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Southern California. Oklahoma definitely scored a coup this week by receiving a federal license for its spaceport near Burns Flat. But the next significant foray into the new-space frontier is scheduled for New Mexico, with this summer's inaugural launch from the Land of Enchantment's not-quite-spaceport.
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Rhetorical battle lines are being drawn in the strange case of the purported Bosnian pyramid - and in recent days, the skeptics have been shining a brighter spotlight on the murkier aspects of an amateur archaeologist's claims.
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• Scientific American: Nanomaterial fuses spider silk and silica
• Carnegie Mellon Univ.: Computer turns 2-D images into 3-D
• BBC: Did glaciers rather than humans move stones to Stonehenge?
• Christian Science Monitor: Forget what you know about H2O
SAO
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Everybody knows Andromeda, the big sister of the Milky Way, who lives right next door. But not as many are familiar with our home galaxy's little sister - the Triangulum galaxy.
Today Triangulum gets her star turn at last, in a high-resolution digital image from the 21-foot (6.5-meter) MMT Observatory in Arizona.
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• Mini-AIR: World Cup research review and more
• Defense Tech: The World Cup's high-tech security force
• CollectSpace: 'Faster than a speeding space shuttle...'
• Moscow News: Experimental Mars mission to start in 2007
• UCSD: Andean people have reverse concept of time
McMaster U. / NASA / ESA |
Hubble's view of the galaxy Arp 220.
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Galactic smash-ups are always good places to look for brilliant bursts of starbirth, and the Hubble Space Telescope has found a real doozy: a mashed-up merger of two galaxies, containing more than 200 mammoth star clusters. Astronomers say the biggest of those clusters contains enough material to make 10 million suns - which makes it twice as massive as any comparable star cluster in the Milky Way.
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• N.Y. Times (reg. req.): Ruins bolster a doubted biblical tale
• NASA: Watch a meteoroid hit the moon
• Space.com: Galactic highway found in Milky Way
• Times of London: I've found God, says genome genius
• Discovery.com: Database to analyze horse speak
Oklahoma's Burns Flat spaceport, the planned home base for Rocketplane Ltd.'s suborbital space tourism flights, has been cleared for operations by the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency announced today. The FAA's issuance of a launch site operator license puts Oklahoma on a par with Mojave, Calif. - and gives it at least a temporary edge over New Mexico in the suborbital spaceport race.
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The World Cup isn’t the only game in town: This year’s international RoboCup finals are also getting their kickoff this week in Germany, and even the commentators are of the robotic persuasion. But that's no easy feat: It turns out that programming a play-by-play robot is just as hard as programming a robo-soccer player.
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How will catastrophe strike? In a survey designed to stir up interest in the Sci Fi Channel's "Countdown to Doomsday," a catastrophic series of terrorist attacks came up as the likeliest scenario for mass destruction - although a potential disease pandemic generated virtually the same amount of paranoia. More tellingly, those same survey respondents said they didn't feel very prepared for either variety of doomsday.
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• BBC: Mars chip to check for signs of life
• NASA: Is this where a meteorite hit (on Mars)?
• Aftenposten: Here's where the meteorite hit (on Earth)
• Science News: Springfield theory on 'The Simpsons'
The Hubble Space Telescope may well be the public's biggest object of affection in outer space, as evidenced by the warm response to the idea of extending the orbiting observatory's operational life. By the same token, the international space station - often referred to by its three-letter acronym, ISS - may well be one of the public's biggest objects of disaffection. Read on for one reader's pointed question about the station - and one astronaut's answer, aimed at explaining why the space station is worth the bother.
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• Technology Review: Is immortality only a dream?
• The Economist: Trust me, I'm a robot
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Saving the National Treasures'
• ASA: On Mars, no one can hear your lawn mower scream
The scientists behind the Hubble Space Telescope delivered yet another stunning celestial image on Thursday, showing a galaxy on edge with a wispy glowing halo. "Hubble-huggers" have been on edge as well, hoping that NASA will send a space shuttle crew to extend the life of space-based astronomy's crown jewel. Although the space agency hasn't yet set a date for that final servicing mission, the shuttle program's manager says preparations are already being made for a rescue.
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• Scotsman: Were Greeks 1,400 years ahead of their time?
• New Scientist: Error-check breakthrough in quantum computing
• EepyBird: Diet Coke + Mentos (via Lunar Lander Challenge)
• Wired.com: A sixth sense for a wired world
The debate over the definition of planethood has been simmering for years – and it bubbled up again this week, thanks to new research into free-floating planemos, or planetary-mass objects. It turns out that the debate could well be settled this summer.
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I’m in Houston for Thursday’s press briefings at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where we’ll get tons of background about next month’s scheduled space shuttle mission. If you want to get the complete 411 on STS-121, check this NASA TV page for schedule information and this one for links to Webcasts. We’ll be readying lots of stories, video and interactives in advance of the July 1-19 window for Discovery’s launch. And if you have any burning questions about the mission or NASA’s changing spaceflight program, send them along and I’ll see if I can get them answered, either this week or at a later time.
• Slate: Among the transhumanists
• PhysOrg: Physicists generate ball lightning in the lab
• Improbable Research: What is reality (in the case of Barney)?
• The Onion: Rogue scientist has his own scientific method
Scientists say the oldest decipherable DNA from a Neanderthal confirms the view that there was little if any hanky-panky between that long-vanished species and modern humans - but they also say their findings show that the Neanderthals were more genetically diverse than previously thought. If anything, the results deepen the mysteries surrounding our ancient, heavy-browed cousins.
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Students and amateurs are working alongside professional archaeologists in rural Georgia this month, searching for the remains of a 400-year-old Spanish mission that's been lost in the mists of time. And although it's a little late to get involved this year, you just might have a chance to join them next summer.
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• Armadillo's Vertical Drag Racer (via RLV/Space Transport News)
• The Age: Pilots offered galactic gig (via Personal Spaceflight)
• The Space Review: Of Segways and space
• SpaceRef: On Capitol Hill, the Space Blitz is on
NASA / JPL-Caltech / CfA |
Red waves of dust swirl around a blue sea of stars in this color-coded infrared image of the Andromeda Galaxy from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
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The Andromeda Galaxy — the nearest spiral to our own — is all dressed up in reddish, dusty swirls in a new infrared portrait from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The picture, which has plenty of scientific as well as aesthetic value, is just one of the visual delights coming out of this week's meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
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• Science News: Quantum-dot leap
• Defense Tech: DARPA's secret space slingshot?
• Aviation Week: Russian plans robotic lunar mission
• CollectSpace: Touch the future of space exploration
• UCS: 'Science Idol' to lampoon science policy (via Slashdot)
Virginia-based Space Adventures, the only travel company to send tourists to the international space station, announced this week that it is acquiring a spaceship-building company called Space Launch Corp. — and it looks as if the move represents a small step toward yet another giant leap into the commercial spaceflight business.
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They may have started out as a plot device for the villain in a James Bond movie, but today, lasers are a totally old-hat technology. They've made their way into humdrum light pointers, supermarket scanners and DVD players. Sasers, on the other hand, are just coming onto the high-tech scene. So what's a saser?
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• National Geographic: 'Space Race: The Untold Story'
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Kaboom!'
• AMSAT: When will SuitSat burn up?
• Discovery.com: Ancient calendar unearthed in Peru
Lots of little mysteries keep adding to the big mystery surrounding the ancient Egyptian chamber known as KV-63. Was the chamber — where seven coffins and 28 jars were tucked away more than 3,000 years ago — meant to be a royal tomb, a hiding place, a supply room for used mummification materials, or all of the above?
The latest little mystery has to do with a 17-inch-long (42-centimeter-long) coffin. The wooden mini-coffin, which is covered with pink-tinged gold, is about the right size for an infant. But it's empty, with no inscription on it. So what purpose was it meant to serve?
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• Science @ NASA: Droids on the space station
• Space.com: Is the search for aliens a religion?
• Popular Science: Is it raining aliens?
• Wired: The scientific community's free radical
